Focused on the case of China’s financial development, the present discursive essay sets out to argue that if the Chinese financial system distorted the allocation of funds then economic growth could not be sustained and financial depth would remain deficient. The essay puts forward selected...

This paper is discussing problems that emerged in the first wave of the voucher privatization in Czechoslovakia (January 1992). The first problem relates to the procedures for evaluation and approval of enterprises’ privatization projects. The original design of the privatization assumed a...

Child poverty matters directly as children constitute a large share of the population and indirectly for future individual and national well- being. Developed country measures of child poverty are dominated by income-poverty, although health and education are often included. But these are not...

This papers sheds light on the puzzling evidence that even though open source software (OSS) is a public good, it is developed for free by highly qualified, young and motivated individuals, and evolves at a rapid pace. We show that once OSS development is understood as the private provision of a...

Agricultural productivity in 41 Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries from 1960 to 1999 is examined by estimating a semi-nonparametric Fourier production frontier. Over the four decades the estimated rate of productivity change was 0.83% per year, although the average rate from 1985-99 was a strong...

Since Barley’s use of Giddens in 1986, structurational approaches have become an important theoretical perspective within the IS research community. This paper introduces an intermediate theory of this stream through three socio-technical archetypes, i.e. stylised socio-technical situations...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and the quality of economic development in Italy. The analysis draws on a dataset collected by the author including about two hundred variables representing different aspects of economic development and...

As a result of changes in the labour market connected with on-going socio-political transformations, the welfare state is no longer able to fulfil its traditional mandate. The focus of debate has thus shifted to civil society, which aims to involve citizens more strongly in the design and...

The goal is to try to give inputs on a global problem: eradicating poverty on a global scale. That is, to find evidence and discuss complex problems regarding cronic poverty, a major source of instability in our world today, and to put forward what could be some possible solutions. The aim of...

This paper demonstrates that the delivery of hardware inputs to Ghana’s basic education system – building classrooms and supplying textbooks – has had a substantial impact on higher enrollments and better learning outcomes. The Bank’s support for school building has been a major factor...